


Queen Bitch

by eva_roisin



Series: They Will Lie: Stories [4]
Category: Dark Avengers (Comic), Marvel 616
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Daddy Issues, Dubious Consent, M/M, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-03
Updated: 2012-01-03
Packaged: 2017-10-28 20:29:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/311874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eva_roisin/pseuds/eva_roisin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daken reacts to Bullseye's death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Queen Bitch

Daken has little patience for poverty.

Poverty is so ordinary. It is, he thinks, the only common denominator that exists among all people. The busses in New Delhi and the corner stores in the Bronx smell the same: like desperation and overripe bananas.

On a busy street in Athens’ commercial district, he leans against the wall and tries not to look at people. People remind him of insects. It’s this he hates: the unwiped nose of everyday despair, the unashamed hustle of hagglers, the bland, dumb, pragmatic way that working-class people approach the world.

He puts his hands in his pockets. In one pocket he’s got a disposable cell phone. In the other, a wad of cash.

The feds have frozen his Avenger bank accounts, and he knows his credit cards are being monitored for activity.

He’s not clean out of cash, though. Of course not. He’s got some funds stashed in strange, out-of-the-way places—safe deposit boxes, storage lockers, foreign bank accounts—but he can’t get to any of it right now. He can’t get to it without taking a plane, and he can’t take a plane because he doesn’t have a credit card. He’s poor.

He watches as a large horse of a girl approaches the intersection, peering at the street signs, craning her neck. The crinkled corners of a folded-up map stick up from her purse. Has a credit card. Has money.

This is too easy. It’s always been too easy.

He fixes his gaze on her and watches as the hair on her neck prickles. She holds her breath and turns around.

He drops his gaze. Goes back to staring at the sidewalk. Like everyone else.

***

The cash in his pocket is American.

Days and days ago, he awoke from a blood-soaked dream to find himself alone. He was in a hotel room bed, the sheets tangled around his body. He sat up and stretched out his arms. Then he saw the bandages and remembered.

His heart was beating.

Slowly he took off the bandages, unwrapping one layer of gauze after another as though looking for a gift.

He knew what he’d find—two even scars on the inside of his arm stretching from his wrist to his elbow—but nothing prepared him for the way his wounds oozed pink fluid and ached. The way they smelled.

That was when he decided to count the money his father left for him on the nightstand.

Wolverine. Wolverine had been there just a day ago. He’d taken Daken by the shoulders and dragged him from the bed and into the harsh light of the bathroom. Head tilted forward, he pushed Daken onto the toilet and examined his wounds. Then he’d doused them with a bottle of acidic-smelling antiseptic.

Daken flinched and recoiled. Wolverine held him down.

When Wolverine was finished cleaning his wounds, he’d held compresses over his arms and waited for the bleeding to slow to a trickle. Then he’d wrapped them in gauze.

He was rougher than Daken would have imagined. Not as rough as he would have liked.

Daken was out of it at the time. Disoriented. Unbelieving. A few times he had a brief, momentary lapse and realized what was happening. He jerked away, jabbing his elbow in Wolverine’s direction.

He couldn’t make a fist.

“Stop it,” Wolverine said, bending down, closing a hand around Daken’s chin, his neck. He stared straight into his eyes and set his hands on his shoulders and shook him once. “Stop crying.”

Daken looked up at Wolverine, breath catching in his throat. He went still—stopped trying to hit Wolverine—and felt himself twitch. He was twitching. No, _hiccupping_. His chest was heaving. His face and eyelashes were wet and damp. He inhaled the scent of his own weakness. Then he could taste it: his own mucus, that globby, salty taste of tears. Shit, he wasn’t crying—he was _sobbing_.

He willed himself to calm down. His breath still came in quick, uncontrollable gasps, but he managed to keep the tears from leaking from his eyes.

He looked up again. Logan had set one hand on his shoulder, the other on the back of his neck. He peered at Daken, and Daken could tell that he was hiding a little bit of concern. Fear, maybe. Not fear of the son he’d just effectively disarmed. This was the fear of the future, the fear of the unscripted blankness that unfolded before them. Who were they without their separate missions? Who was Wolverine if he wasn’t trying to save Daken? Who was Daken if he wasn’t trying to kill Wolverine?

Daken tensed again and lurched forward.

“Stop it!” Wolverine said, shoving him hard back onto the toilet seat. The lid creaked. He grabbed his neck again. “You stupid kid. Stop fighting. It’s over, Daken. It’s over.” He took a breath. Then, implored: “You need to let it go now.”

Daken slumped against the back of the toilet and stared up at Wolverine. Wolverine’s eyes were like his but a slightly different color; he couldn’t remember if he’d noticed that before, he couldn’t remember, couldn’t remember . . .

“That’s better,” Wolverine said, taking his hands from Daken’s shoulders. Then he handed him a roll of toilet paper. “Blow your nose.”

Daken did as he was told. He laid the wad of crumpled up toilet paper to the side.

Wolverine knelt in front of him. He continued to wrap his forearms with gauze. Gentler now. He didn’t look up. “Don’t ever let me see you do that again. Okay?” He paused. Then he pulled the gauze tighter and patted the corner he’d just folded down. “You haven’t earned the right to cry.”

And then Logan cried, later on. (Daken supposed he’d earned the right.) Daken was in bed, pretending to sleep, and Logan was sitting at the desk, weeping quietly. He cried the way a man is supposed to cry—not with snot and hot shame, but with tranquil, passive dignity.

Daken fell asleep.

When he awoke a day later, Logan was gone. He’d left a stack of bills on the nightstand, just a messy wad of cash not bound with a rubber band or a money clip.

Daken reached for it. Sat up and counted it, organizing the bills in neat stacks and keeping track of what he had. Seventeen hundred U.S. dollars.

Seventeen hundred dollars.

That wasn’t a parting gift from a father to a son. That was a handjob.

Whatever it took. Daken was going to kill Wolverine.

***

Another hotel room.

He’s sprawled out on the bed, waiting for the room to stop spinning. He’s just downed three bottles of cheap wine in rapid succession—the only sure way to get any kind of buzz. Unfortuately he’ll be sober in a few minutes.

He’s in Romania. Romania, he thinks. Capital, Bucharest. Population, twenty-two million, five hundred thirty-three thousand, and seventy four. Language, Rumanian. Last vestige of the Roman Empire.

That. That was what he’d been made to memorize and spit back to Romulus all those year before. Romulus had made him learn the details about every country in the world and as many languages as he could master. If he fucked up—if he confused the capitals of Azerbaijan and Armenia, for instance—he’d get a beating.

Not that he minded a beating. Teeth grew back. Bruises faded. There was a certain thrill in watching his body close an open wound.

What stung was the humiliation of getting things wrong.

Romulus did him good in some ways. Conditioned him into having a memory for detail, a mind that catalogues everything it encounters. He can read a page and recite back its contents. Multiply large numbers in his head. Retain the workings of a dozen languages. He’s no smarter than anyone else, just better trained. Disciplined. Self-aware. He doesn’t understand why other people are so lazy with their memories, why they don’t see what passes before their eyes. They forget things easily—what they ate for lunch or what bill they handed the cashier. Where they parked the car, or what the cab driver saw. Who said what. Karla was always misplacing her coat. “You left it in the kitchen, dear,” Daken would tell her. Or: “You hung it in closet on the right-hand side, next to Lester’s pathetic excuse for a leather jacket. Not the brown one. The black one. With the ridiculous collar.”

In the corner the TV chatters. Daken hears something. Blinks and then sits up. Bullseye looks him straight in the face.

The TV shows Bullseye with a mask, then Bullseye without a mask. Then Bullseye in his Hawkeye outfit. Then Bullseye at a much younger age. Then the cops pacing around some crime scene in New York, the wind whipping at the yellow “do not cross” tape.

Bullseye is dead. Daken leans back on the bed and smiles faintly. Lester, ah Lester. Now who’s the joke? I told you. I told you so.  

Minutes tick by. Daken feels a sluggishness gathering in his extremities, a sign that the alcohol is wearing off. He rolls over and looks at the TV again. Scrambles for the remote so that he can turn up the volume.

He has two thoughts, both of them strange. The first is that Bullseye can’t possibly be dead—it simply isn’t possible. The second is that he’s got to do something about this—that the person who hurt Bullseye has got to pay.

The second thought strikes him as bizarre.

After all, Daken was planning on killing Lester all along. He tolerated Lester only to the extent that he made things entertaining. During the siege, he’d abandoned Lester on the battlefield; before that, he’d been planning on selling him out—selling _all_ of them out—to the enemy. To the Avengers, to the Asgardians, to the highest bidder.

Still, Bullseye was his. He belonged to Daken. And you don’t kill what belongs to a man and get away with it.

He remembers the last time he and Lester had talked.

“Well, look at you,” Lester had said.

Daken didn’t need to turn his head to look, but he did anyway. He already knew that Lester was poised to stab him with another arrow.

“Yes, do,” he said. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone that you want to tap my . . . assets.”

And that was all it took.

“Go ahead,” Lester said, clutching the arrow. “Tell your fake little stories. See if I care.”

He wanted to point out that the stories weren’t fake. But he just decided to leave it.

But Lester just had to get another word in. “Talk is all you’re good for,” he said. In his hand, the arrow snapped in half.

A sure sign, Daken thought, that Lester’s denial was just for show.

Daken doubled back and set a hand on Lester’s shoulder. “Oh, Lester. You know that’s not true. Let me prove it to you.” Again. Again and again. Remember how good it was?

Lester smelled of anger and frustration and pure violent desire.

Daken drew closer. “This could be our last day on earth, after all.” And he did his best not to feel wistful—because he wasn’t—but wistfulness lurked beneath the surface. After today, nothing would be the same again. For the better. But still.

Lester tried, for the last time in his life, to stab Daken in the throat.

***

Two months previously, Daken had found Lester sprawled out on the rec room floor. The TV was on, Dr. Phil filling the silence with an admonition about parental neglect, and Lester was just lying there, eyes closed, the remote control clutched to his chest like a cross.

Daken had been trying to sneak out of Avengers’ Tower for the day for a little shopping time to himself. When he stepped into the room, he immediately scented Lester’s terrible sadness. Depression. Anxiety.

He tried his best not to smile. These big, messy emotions of Lester’s were his doing—and he wasn’t even _doing_ anything anymore. This was the beauty of his power; people could be broken in so many different ways, and he’d conditioned Lester to react just to the sight of him, or to the sound of his voice, or to the thought of him. He’d had him turned inside out for months. First aggression, then arousal. Then, crippling sadness. Then, all three. A perfect clusterfuck of human frailty. Lester was on some ridiculous medication—more than the usual anti-psychotics he’d been on for years. Daken knew this because he made it his business to know, and at least the pharmacist was cute and smelled fairly good.

Daken stopped cheerfully in the middle of the floor, hands in his pockets. He thought about asking Lester to come along. Just for fun. Just so he could strand him in the middle of some dressing room and take his pants and his cell phone. He’d use Lester’s cell phone to text Karla. _Come find me in Neiman Marcus. Come suck my cock._ Then he’d toss the cell phone into the Hudson—but not before downloading all of Lester’s more titillating personal texts and pictures.

(Full disclosure: he’d done that sort of thing before. Once, when he and Lester were in line to see _Shutter Island_ , Daken had slipped his cell phone from his pocket. Later that night, when Lester was half-seducing, half-forcing some H.A.M.M.E.R. agent into a career-compromising position, Daken sent a text to Karla. _Come to my room. I have something for you_.

Karla got back to him right away. _That thing we talked about?_

Daken texted back. _Just hurry_. He had the feeling that Karla was going to show up naked.)

Now Lester lay on the ground. He didn’t look at Daken. He was crying. _Crying_.

Daken stopped smiling. Sniffed, just to make sure those tears were real and not the residue from some delayed allergy attack. “Jesus Lester. What the hell.”

Lester’s eyes flew open. “ _What_.”

He hurled the remote control at Daken’s face. It hit him in the nose.

Daken seethed. He almost reached down to pick up up the remote control. He'd cram it down Lester's throat. Then he thought better of it. “What’s wrong?” he said. (Fascinated. Had he done this thing to Lester? To _Lester_? Really?)

“You ask like you care,” Lester said. But he didn’t turn away. He didn’t reach for the knife holstered to his ankle either. He sat up and leaned limply against the couch.

“But Lester, I do care,” Daken said. “And you know I care.” Maybe he did care—not for Lester, but for himself. Lester wasn’t essential to his plan (if he dropped off the grid tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter one whit to Daken’s overall scheme), but he still wanted to know what was going on. He’d counted on at least one loose cannon in his midst—Bob. What if Lester cracked too?

But more importantly, he just wanted to know for the sake of knowing. He wanted to know what could inspire this kind of upheaval in a man like Lester. For future reference.

Lester’s face crumpled again. Fat tears streaked from the corners of his eyes, leaving snail-like trails glistening on his skin.

“Jesus _Christ_ , Lester.” Daken gently lowered himself onto the floor and sat next to Lester.

“I don’t know,” Lester said.

“What?”

“You asked me what’s wrong.” He snuffled up his snot. “I’m telling you. I don’t know.”

Daken sniffed. Eight different chemicals oozed from Lester’s pores. “Your medication. It’s off. You should get it checked.” He set his hand on the floor in order to push himself to his feet again. “I’ll get you a name. A real doctor. Not Karla. Not these H.A.M.M.E.R. quacks either. Someone real. Someone who charges by the hour. You’ll be yourself in no time at all.”

Lester’s arm shot out. He set his hand on Daken’s. “Don’t.”

Daken blinked.

“I like this me,” Lester explained.

“I don’t,” Daken said. “Mac liked that him too, remember? Remember what a fucking sop he was? You tried to kill him.”

Lester went very still. He was no longer crying, but the tears sat on his cheeks. He locked onto Daken.

Daken stiffened. Lester's gaze was disquieting. There was something weird about it, something unguarded and searching, artless and undefined. Lester was unmasking him. Looking to unearth something that Daken wasn’t sure he had. And the confidence of his gaze—the pure unself-consciousness of it—set Daken’s teeth on edge.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Lester said. “You don’t feel. You don’t have real feelings.”

“You don’t either,” Daken pointed out. “But I’ll tell you what’s real: you need to lay off the Buspar. It’s making you fat.” He sighed. “Soon you’ll blow up like a balloon and not be able to pass for Hawkeye at all. No, Lester. This isn’t you. This is a _side-effect_. Medication can’t make you grow a conscience. It can’t make you turn into a real boy.”

Lester’s hand shot out again. This time he closed his fingers around Daken’s wrist and squeezed hard. “Stay out of my mind, Daken.”

“I’m not in your mind, Lester,” Daken said, almost sing-songy. He chuckled, but he could hear his own discomfort. “Don’t flatter yourself. No one is knocking around in there but you. No one else would want to take credit for your specialness.”

“You think I haven’t figured it out, Daken? You think I don’t know that you’re some creepy telepath? I know what you are. You may have everyone else fooled, but I know.”

 _Now_ Daken pulled his wrist away.

“All these months I’ve been like everyone else—fucking shitside and wondering how the hell I got that way. But now I know. I know about all of your games. In the last few weeks, I’ve been able to think for the first time in a long time.” His face cracked into a smile. “You don’t fool me.”

“I have no powers,” Daken said. “Not like the ones you’ve just described.” He pushed himself to his feet. (He was losing control of this situation. He needed to think.) “I’m simply a careful student of human nature. It might behoove you to become one too.”

Lester rose over him like a shadow. “I’ll tell Norman.”

“Tell him,” Daken said.  

“I will.”

“Except that you won’t.”

But he wondered what would happen if Lester called his bluff. Norman didn’t put a lot of stock in the things that Lester said, but he’d still investigate. And the last thing Daken needed was for Norman to start snooping around in his past. Shining a light into some dark dingy corners. Checking his references.

He needed to shut this down.

He smirked. “You won’t tell him,” he continued, “because you’re wrong. And you know you’re wrong. And once you tell Norman some wild story about something you think I did to you . . . some paranoid delusion about your own self-importance . . . he’ll never look at you the same way again. He already knows you’re coming unhinged. After you show your hand, he’ll think you’re a problem. A threat to national security. He’ll start looking to replace you. Send you back to that mountain.”

“He’s already looking to sell me down river,” Lester replied. He sidled up to Daken, so close their noses almost touched. “I might as well take you with me. After all of the shit you’ve pulled, it’s a small price to pay.”

Daken stepped back. “Trust me on the Buspar, Lester. A real fatty maker.”

“You think we’re not on the way out anyway?” Lester squared off with him and lowered his voice. “You think we’re not all going to prison? You think your pops’ friends don’t already have our cells all cleared and waiting?”

Of course Daken knew this. Osborn was a sinking ship, a losing pony. But Daken also knew that he was never, ever going to jail.

“Maybe I won’t say anything just now,” Lester said. “Maybe I’ll save the information for another buyer.”

“You give me too much credit. I’m not a telepath.” He smirked again. “But if I were, I’d know exactly what you were going to do, right? And I’d be a few steps ahead. So watch yourself.”

Lester reached out and hit Daken across the mouth. Closed fist. Something popped—either Daken’s jaw or Lester’s knuckle.

Daken fell onto the sofa. He felt strangely pleased. Sated. He could have dodged Lester’s blow—he’d certainly known it was coming—and yet he’d chosen to stand there and take it.

He’d let it happen.

And then, right then, he could have gotten up, popped his claws, and put an end to all of this. Instead he just clutched his jaw and then rolled onto his stomach. He waited.

***

Mashed against him, Lester was clumsy. He fumbled for his dick, which swelled and oozed and turned a bruised color.

He’d ordered Daken to take off all of his clothes, and Daken had hurriedly removed everything but his socks. On the rec room sofa, they writhed together. Slipped. Lester chewed his bottom lip. Daken squeezed Lester’s ass, not caring about the sexiness of the situation (it wasn’t particularly sexy) or whether or not someone would find them, or what the cameras saw.

When Lester entered him he felt it, he felt it _a lot_ —he definitely felt that hard, uncomfortable jolt. He grimaced and bit his lower lip.

They never found a rhythm.

Lester’s movements were jerky, needy. He pumped into Daken, eyes closed. His hips snapped with selfish abandon.

Beneath him, Daken watched the way Lester’s face twisted and distorted, the way his cheeks hollowed and the corners of his eyes pulled. He came quickly and easily inside of Daken and moaned loudly, three times.

He pulled off Daken and fastened his pants. He looked down at Daken’s naked body (still hard) but said nothing.

Daken’s hand fluttered for his cock.

Then Lester was back with him again, his head between his legs, his mouth on his cock. Daken arched his back and hooked his knees around Lester’s shoulders.

The entire blowjob lasted about twenty seconds.

When it was all over—when Lester had slunk away and gone back to his room, leaving Daken alone on the sofa with his clothes just out of reach—Daken raised his head and looked around. Disbelieving. He couldn’t get over what had just happened. He felt exhausted but tuned up, as though someone had just stretched his limbs to the brink before letting them go slack. He was completely bewildered. Quietly ecstatic. He searched his thoughts for an overall moral of the story. Something he could package and remember. _Now I’ve got you_ , he thought, but as soon as he thought that he felt that it wasn’t right. His thoughts weren’t matching up to his feelings. Something didn’t quite fit.

***

But they fit.

It took them less than twenty-four hours to fuck again. This time they used the bed in Lester’s room. Lester tried fumbling for his stereo—probably trying to use the awful heavy metal of his youth as a soundtrack—but Daken discouraged him by fastening his mouth to one of Lester’s nipples. He didn’t like to fuck to music. He wanted to hear the noises they both made: the sucking and kissing, the swap of bodily fluids, the creak of the headboard, the uncontrived panting and moaning.

Lester pinned him to the mattress and levered himself against Daken, his body picking up speed, his ass quivering. Afterwards he let Daken return the favor and Daken took his time, working Lester into a slow but steady peak, hips slamming ungracefully against Lester’s ass. He searched his brain for the tricks he’d banked in the last fifty years. None of them rose to the surface. What mattered was this: the immediacy of this hasty, peerless coupling, the demands of their own bodies; the sweat on the sheets, the cum. Afterwards they didn’t even mind sleeping in the dampness—but to be fair, they didn’t sleep that much. One would doze for an hour before the other would be hard again.

When they were finally satisfied that they were finished for the night, Lester flopped onto his back and reached for Daken. Daken leaned against him, his cheek pressed against the hollow of Lester’s shoulder. He knew he should leave, but he didn’t. He stayed until morning.

***

In the daytime things didn’t change all that much.

For instance: there was the day that Daken walked into the kitchen and felt a projectile whiz past his face. He stopped. Looked up. A knife was wedged between the doorframe and the wall.

“Don’t kid yourself, shitass,” Lester said. He leaned against the counter, his arms crossed. “If I’d intended to kill you, your brains would be in the next room.”

“Eloquent.” Daken pulled the knife from the wall.

Lester’s eggplant was missing. He blamed Daken.

“Did you ask Mac?” Daken said, trying to slip past him.

Lester’s arm shot out and blocked Daken’s path. “I’m asking you, klepto.”

Behind them, Bob slid from the bench and climbed to his feet. “Did you take his eggplant, son?”

Lester dropped his arm and turned around. Daken peered over Lester’s shoulder.

Bob looked down and adjusted the S on his belt. “It’s not right to take things that aren’t yours.” He headed for the doorway.

Lester and Daken parted to give Bob space.

***

At night they worked themselves into a pitch, giving and taking, groping and tugging. They cared only about pure primal satisfaction.

Lester wedged into him like he was the knife and Daken was that corner of that wall. They never used anything—no lube, certainly no condoms. Just saliva and blood. Each other’s cum.

After each orgasm, Daken wondered at all of this, privately fascinated. Bewildered. He wasn’t doing anything anymore—nothing to provoke this bizarre outpouring of sexual frankness and unbridled release. More disturbingly, he didn’t know _why_ he was doing this. He didn’t know what he wanted out of this arrangement. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he wasn’t simply fucking someone to get information, a favor, or special, privileged access to someone’s private world.

During his lazy, unstructured afternoons, he lay on his bed and thought about Bullseye and wondered what he had to gain by fucking him so frequently, and with so much alacrity. _Nothing_ , he concluded. _Only a good time_.

It wasn’t the answer he wanted to give himself. But somehow, strangely, it worked.

***

Lester liked to strangle and be strangled. When he did the strangling, he tightened his hands around Daken’s throat and wrung. Hard.

Daken was gentler. He knew that neither of them really needed a safe signal, but he carefully monitored Lester’s vitals anyway, twisting his scarf around his neck until he came.

Lester liked it rough. He liked to hit and punch. To cut. He liked watching Daken heal.

But Daken was the one drawing a big circle around Lester, laying claim. At least this is what he told himself. Truth was, the situation might have been bigger than he imagined. Beyond him.

***

When they weren’t fucking each other senseless—when they were on a mission or doing their daily chores for Osborn—they hated each other.

Maybe they hated themselves. Just a little bit, for having gotten so carried away here.

Understand that what they had was not a _relationship_. It was merely a partnership of need and desire, a spectacular coming-together of matching libidos. Neither felt any shame. Neither could experience the pang of degradation.

But Daken figured out that Lester wanted things kept hush-hush. Maybe he was more ashamed than Daken thought.

“Oh Lester,” Daken said one afternoon. They were in a warehouse in Queens getting ready to interrogate a suspect. He held a towel in his hands. “I’m going to strangle him. Then I’m going to do that thing that I like best. That you like too. When I get finished, this towel won’t be enough. You know what I’m talking about.”

Tied to a chair, mouth gagged, the suspect tensed and cried. Tears leaked from his eyes.

Two H.A.M.M.E.R. agents—a couple of real ends-justify-the-means types with hard-ons for maintaining “national security” at all costs—stood point in the doorway. One turned sharply. The other looked up.

Lester stopped moving around. Behind his mask, he leveled one hell of a gaze at Daken. “Keep your sick, twisted little games to yourself.”

“But you’ll love to _watch_ , Lester. It’ll give you ideas for later.”

Lester drove an arrow into Daken’s neck.

Daken came to a few minutes later. Lester was gone. The two agents hovered above him.

“Shit, Gannon,” one said. “You better get a mop.”

“Why me?” the other said. “I’m so sick of this shit. I’m so sick of cleaning up after these people.”

“Shut up, Gannon. Just do your fuckin’ job.”

“These guys are freaks. Do you hear me? Sickos and sociopaths. It’s like working security for a goddamn burned-out eighties rock band without the possibility of getting any pussy.”

Daken watched as his hair swirled in his own blood. He made a mental note to look up Gannon. Find out where he lived.

That night, Lester licked Daken’s neck, paying special attention to the spot where he’d driven in his arrow. Then Daken flipped Lester over and fucked him from behind, slow and hard. When he was ready to come, he pulled out. “Roll over,” he rasped. Lester complied, flopping onto his back. Daken came on his stomach, his chest. Then he seated himself on Lester’s cock.

Lester seemed subdued. He lasted an unusually long time, hips slowly rising with his breath.

That weekend they tracked down Gannon at a nightclub in New Jersey and kidnapped him. After cutting his throat, they dumped him two miles from the Newark line.

“And New York’s crime rate continues to stay nice and low,” Lester said. “While New Jersey’s skyrockets.”

“Don’t let Norman ever say we didn’t do him any favors,” Daken replied.

***

Most nights they were rough. Others more affectionate. One time Lester attempted to give Daken a massage. “Jesus, you’re terrible,” Daken said. Lester’s fingers were probing his back as though he was tenderizing a piece of meat. “Stop beating suspects. Start doing this to them instead.”

One night Lester lay with his head in Daken’s lap while Daken read him a book. Daken touched the target sign gouged into Lester’s forehead.

“This is so boring. You’re so boring, Daken.” But he didn’t get up and slip back to his bedroom.

In the daytime Daken was bored with Lester. He sneered at his lack of education and shitty middleclass tastes. Lester liked chain restaurants. Women who wore boots over their jeans. Sports bars. TV.

They never really hung out together—not without things ending in some kind of fit or insult slinging.

No one else said anything—no one else was so stupid—but everyone seemed to accept what was going on. Karla’s glances were alternately hostile and amused. Mac smirked but stopped asking Daken to work out with him.

One evening, before they’d even gotten started, Victoria rapped on Lester’s door. “If you two can stand to be apart for a few hours—”

Lester jerked open the door. “Excuse me, butter face?”

“I need Daken for a special assignment.”

“Give us a few minutes,” Lester said, slamming the door. He turned to face Daken. “What the fuck. What the fuck have you been telling people?”

Daken reached for his jacket. “Telling people? Are you out of your goddamn mind? I’ve never said anything.” He did his zipper and tried not to smile so much. “I don’t need to. You’re my queen bitch, Bullseye. My go-to. And when a man’s got a queen bitch, he doesn’t need to spell it out for his other whores. It’s obvious to everyone.”

Lester grabbed a knife from his dresser.

Daken blocked and wrenched the knife from Lester’s fingers. “Oh, come on, Lester. Take it as a compliment.”

“I’m not your anything!”

“Yes you are.”

Lester shoved him. His head knocked against the wall.

What happened next was anyone’s guess. Lester peeled Daken’s clothes from his body and Daken pretended, half-heartedly, to fight him off. Lester ripped off his briefs, pressed him against the wall. Entered him without any ceremony.

Daken grimaced.

“Now who’s the bitch?” Lester whispered.

“You tell me. Why are you doing exactly what I want?”

Lester took a fistful of his hair and pulled.

When he was finished, he grabbed the knife from the floor and rammed it through Daken’s shoulder.

Daken groaned and slumped to the floor. He reached up to pull out the knife. “Damn,” he gasped. Then he rolled over and grinned at Lester. “Oh my. Seems like I . . . hit a nerve . . .”

Lester knelt in front of him and gently took the bloody knife from Daken’s hand. He peered into Daken’s face. “Did you forget about the half dozen ways I can screw you over? With Norman? I know what you are, remember? Your pops does too. That’s why he hired the same guy who shot your moms to take you out as well. That’s pretty fucked up. And I thought my family history was fist-fucked.”

Daken looked up at Lester, blood spilling from his shoulder.

“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of practice being someone else’s queen bitch.”

(It had been a moment of weakness, one of these nights they lay together and felt especially generous. Lester had shared some of his private, tortured past; Daken had told him the lurid Logan-Deadpool-Bucky Barnes story. Now he couldn’t believe that he had been so stupid.)

He popped his claws and jammed them into Lester’s chest. Lester fell to his knees, temporarily incapacitated. That would hurt. Just long enough.

Then he climbed to his feet, toweled off, found his clothes, and went to go see about Victoria.

***

In Bucharest, Daken insinuates himself into the lives of a vacationing British couple, satisfying their need for a little sexual variety. He pretends to be a poor law student.

He screws the young wife with the husband watching. Then he sucks off the husband.

As they drift off to sleep, he kills them both, taking their credit cards and passports. He’s careful to wear a hooded sweatshirt to get past the security cameras.

He books a flight to Tokyo. Right away. But first he has to stop in Seoul to access one of his secret bank accounts. He’s not going to be poor.

On the plane he touches his neck, his shoulder, and thinks of Lester.

He and Lester eventually stopped sleeping together. Not all at once. Little by little. Lester started fucking Karla again, and Daken went back to screwing random H.A.M.M.E.R. agents and targeting pretty New York socialites.

Karla adjusted Lester’s medication, and then—only then—did Lester seem to realize the full extent of what they’d done together, of the secret, sordid trail of sweat and tortured wrongness they’d left in each other’s bedrooms.

He clamped down. Went silent. Told Daken to stop telling his fake little stories and dropping his little intimations. “What a liar you are,” he said one time when he and Daken were in the van together, riding off to some mission. “What a joke.”

Daken just smiled. Inside, he knew he’d have the last word. But it doesn't feel that way now.

Having the last word wasn’t what drove him, or what he remembered now. No. He and Lester had shared something—some real intimacy. Not anything that resembled compassion. This was about sex, pure and simple—the way their nerve endings clanged when they came together, the way Lester dug his heels into Daken’s calves, the way they curled up afterwards and watched some stupid game.

They’d both been pulled tight, laid bare. Daken suspected that the entire arrangement terrified Lester. Maybe it terrified him, too. Sex was _leverage_. It was a tit-for-tat kind of thing, a language of exchange. But with Lester it something different. Pure pleasure. A kind of reach for self-gratification and greedy loss of control. But not just that. Generosity too. They both worked hard to satisfy each other as if their own pleasure depended upon it. As if each other's pleasure mattered.

 _I would have killed you_ , Daken thinks as he stares out the plane window at the blinking lights of the wings.

But maybe he wouldn’t have killed Lester that soon. Maybe he would have held onto him for a while. Had him again. And again and again.

What, if anything, could be more generous than that?

 


End file.
